Michael Henley

I don’t know how I feel about the whole super injunction thing. I have no interest in a sports player’s personal life, but I also hear and understand the arguments about it being the top of a slippery slope. I would like to trust the judgement of the the judiciary; on the whole I do although cases like Trafigura make me question. I have a feeling that a lot of the bile that has been spouted about the celebrities that are allegedly covered by these injunctions has relatively little to do with moral values or setting an example. It comes from jealousy and anger. Anger at ridiculous levels of pay; anger at things like corruption.

I don’t see these as valid reasons to drag the names, lives and loves of those involved through the mud. Anyone knows that no man is an island and the naming of these people will have consequences. Be they for their kids in the playground, their wives in the workplace, there will be consequences. Do these innocent parties deserve that, on top of the personal and emotional pain that they are exposed to by learning that their husband or father has been unfaithful? In my opinion, no.

Should companies that hawk their product on the back of a celebrity’s name demand to be informed contractually if one of these has been issued? I think that would be a good start in taking some of the legitimacy out of these revelations. If someone uses their name to profit and then does something that will damage that name then they should suffer for it. Legal protections such as these exist to protect people; Not to protect their incomes. A system allowing a distinction to be made would be a vast improvement.

In recent days there has been a new round of injunction breaking. Even if it were legal to I wouldn’t link to it given what has been revealed. I think David Aaronovitch summed it up perfectly on twitter:

I hope some people, having seen the details of injunctions posted on Twitter, now understand why they were granted. I am ashamed of us.

If you do decide to go hunting for what has been published you will easily find it. I hope it makes you as uneasy as it makes me.

In the mean time, those publishing on twitter or any other medium are breaking English and Welsh law and should be treated accordingly. If you decide to take it as far as it has gone without taking some basic precautions like using a VPN then I have little sympathy for you.

I can’t help but empathise with those involved; Those that are innocent but for their association and relation to someone with a talent that has granted them a god-like status amongst the tabloids. Anyone demanding that this kind of thing be published ‘in the public interest’ needs to start considering the people involved. I would hope that starts to add some shades of grey to your opinion.

At the beginning of this post I said that I didn’t know how I felt about injunctions, but I think in the course of writing it I have gained a better idea. I want to be sure that it can’t be abused, but I fully believe that their purpose is an important one.

Disclaimer: I’m Oxbridge and Public School. Yeh.

As a current university student I haven’t liked a lot of what I’ve seen during the higher education funding debate/FUD-spreading/mud-slinging . First there was all of the stuff before the inevitable fee rise. That was never not going to happen but regardless, the campaign by students unions seemed to throw caution to the wind and sell it as meaning people from disadvantaged backgrounds wouldn’t be able to go to University. We are their peers and so if that is what we are telling them they are a damn sight more likely to listen than to the Government. It was never the case that this would be the result – the loan is pretty generous, the poorest students would get better non-repayable grants, and the repayment threshold was going up. That combined with the total debt being a little more than a single years average Grad salary makes it a decent investment in your future. I would have far preferred the line of my representatives to be letting people know that regardless of the headlines this means that nobody with the will, drive and ability to go to the best universities will be prevented from doing so by circumstance.

This ties in with the stuff on suggested race discrimination by Cameron and David Lammy but I am not going into that. It is messy and I don’t know enough. I think that Stephen Bush‘s interview in the Guardian covered that really well and anyone that hasn’t seen it should. (As an aside on that, I never understood why Hanna Thomas talks about ‘supervisions’ in a direct quote about Oxford. We call them Tutorials; Cambridge call them Supervisions. Maybe not relevant but seemed odd at the time)

Today I saw things like ‘Richest students to pay for extra places at Britain’s best unversities’ cropping up on facebook and twitter. Honestly, my first reaction was a combination of a horrified groan and disbelief at the idea, and that was the right one. To the headline and the article. It’s completely baseless. Of the 868 words of it, Willetts quotation makes up less than one-eighth. He is quoted as saying:

There are various important issues that need to be addressed around off-quota places, but I start from the view that an increase in the total number of higher education places could aid social mobility.

There would need to be arrangements to make sure any such system was fair and worked in the interests of students as well as institutions. But it is not clear what the benefit is of the current rules, which, for example, limit the ability of charities or social enterprises to sponsor students.

We are inviting ideas on the whole concept and we will listen very carefully to all the responses we receive.

Now granted, it doesn’t explicitly say that people aren’t allowed personally to pay for a place off-quota, but it doesn’t say it either. In fact it specifically says that it is businesses and charities that would be paying for the students’ education. The idea is obviously one designed to expand the schemes such as the ones KPMG are pioneering whereby people leave university not with debt, but having been paid a salary, with a recognised qualification, and a term of employment waiting for them. Considering the extensive requirements for diversity placed on these companies this could hardly lead to a discrimination. Nor do I really envisage a system akin to a tax-avoidance scheme funneling money through schools and charities to get this done. Hell, put a limit on the charities side of things to say that they can only do it for people that would otherwise qualify for full fee support and bursary.

Really this idea seems like it is very early days, but has the makings of something good. We have issues with university funding and we heard lots about how increased fees were going to put off people from poorer backgrounds. In an ideal world this would have been dealt with during the fees debate to ensure that these misconceptions weren’t prevalent. However, given they seem to be, this could be one way of addressing some of this. Not too long ago (I can’t find the link but will keep looking) I read of a charity that was taking kids from backgrounds that meant that they tended to have no experience of University, and were the perfect candidates to be put off, and then gave them encouragement and advice, along with some interview practice, etc. to make sure that they were in a good position to apply to places like the university I am lucky enough (but also worked hard) to attend. They were getting people in. Now combine this with benefactors that want to help relieve the fee burden and then we start to get somewhere.

There is no simple quick solution to how we fund higher education, but there is a simple fact that we have huge demand for education and little money to speak of. I would prefer a multi-pronged approach where the problem is tackled from several angles and artificial constraints are not placed on how many people universities can take. If it were to mean that universities started overfilling lecture theatres (more than they already do), or using grad students to teach (more than they already do), or any other of the myriad ways that more people could lead to a lower quality education, or indeed that suddenly if you had money then you were in, then I would be whole-heartedly 100% against this. Frankly, that is not what Willetts put on the table. He is quite clear about this in Hansard. Scepticism and firm guidance to make sure of a good result is excellent, but cheap politicking with a potentially good move is just daft.

Update 1: Edited 2011-05-11:1058 To include charity link to Guardian

Those who pay attention to the UK and technology will know that the Digital Economy Act is now law with all the threats of disconnection and censorship therein. I am not going to write a long analysis of this; we all know it is a travesty and a terrible example of poorly thought-out legislation that is highly vulnerable to the law of unforeseen consequences, as well as a testament to the kinds of things that really can get fired through Government and into law provided the right people want it to be the case. That scares me, but is a discussion for another day.

My response to this is simple and (for the moment at least) legal. My traffic is encrypted and tunnelled out to a different part of the Internet before emerging. At the moment my computer is Swedish and shall remain that way for a little while. A few mouse-clicks later and my machine can be Swiss. A few more and it is Malaysian. The simple fact is that I can’t change my hard-line ISP very easily, but VPN providers are numerous and many of them cater to exactly my needs. I am now spending a little more each month than I was before for Internet access, but I know that this access is secure be it from corporations, special interest groups or the Government. Oh, and now I donate to the Open Rights Group. You should too.

So who loses out from this? I am slightly inconvenienced but life doesn’t really change, but the people who really have found the majority of traffic being unencrypted useful are the security services. Just from a signal-to-noise ratio point of view until now it was really people who especially wanted everything secret who encrypted and so drew attention to themselves. Now a large proportion of those who are tech-literate will employ encryption, IP-spoofing, use proxies and VPN tunnels. Anything to make ourselves feel less intruded upon. The Swedish example shows that this will be the case, and that it will lead only to a small, and short-lived, drop in downloads.

I finally should give a sincere thank you to people like the ORG, and Tom Watson & Evan Harris, who was until recently my local MP, for not only raising awareness about this issue, but for working to try to make it at least workable. If we had people like this on the Front Benches instead of the Back we might have a Government I had some confidence in.